You Will Shoot Your Eye Out

Less than a year after promising they weren’t “coming for anyone’s guns,” Rhode Island lawmakers just filed 18 gun control bills — including one that would criminalize possession of firearms purchased lawfully before their last ban even takes full effect.

Remember last year, when Rhode Island Democrats rammed through a sweeping ban on modern sporting rifles — the ones they love to mislabel “assault weapons” — and swore up and down they weren’t coming for anyone’s guns? They were just regulating future sales, they said. Law-abiding owners had nothing to worry about.

Yeah. About that.

At a recent House Judiciary Committee hearing, Ocean State lawmakers dropped 18 gun control bills in a single package. Not sales restrictions. Not waiting periods. Full-on possession bans. On firearms Rhode Islanders already own. Legally. Before the prior ban has even fully kicked in.

This is exactly what gun rights advocates have been screaming about for decades. And it’s precisely what the gun control crowd has been telling us would never happen.

What’s actually in the package

The 18-bill slate is a greatest-hits album of every Democrat’s wishlist:

• A direct assault on the bipartisan Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA) via a “public nuisance” liability scheme — the same unconstitutional trick anti-gunners have been trying to run in half a dozen states, designed to bankrupt the industry through death-by-lawsuit.
• Gun rationing (because apparently the Second Amendment comes with a monthly quota).
• Background checks on ammunition.
• Mandatory training requirements.
• Mandatory liability insurance to exercise a constitutional right. Try to imagine them requiring this for voting or speech.
• And the headline-grabber: outright possession bans on commonly-owned semiautomatic rifles.

The PLCAA-targeting bill is particularly sneaky. It would force firearms manufacturers, distributors, and retailers to implement vague, undefined “reasonable controls” over how they make, sell, and market lawful products — opening them up to ruinous litigation every time a criminal misuses a gun. Which is precisely what Congress passed PLCAA to prevent.

Here’s the tell. A possession ban isn’t a regulation on commerce. It’s the confiscation of lawfully owned property, full stop.

You followed every law when you bought your rifle. You passed the background check. You filled out the 4473. You did everything they told you to do. And now Rhode Island wants to turn you into a felon for owning the same gun they approved you to buy.

Don’t take our word for it. Here’s Rep. Teresa Tanzi, the bill’s sponsor, telling the House Judiciary Committee exactly what she has in mind for firearms her constituents legally own: “We have defined which is dangerous and we have the right to regulate it into nonexistence.”

That’s not a gun safety policy. That’s an agenda.

And it comes less than a year after Governor Dan McKee signed last year’s ban with explicit assurance that the law “allows lawful owners to possess these firearms.” McKee himself has a track record on this — last year he quietly tried to slip an assault weapons ban into his budget proposal after failing to get one through the legislature the honest way.